We started our Docker journey in 2014 and and began exploring orchestration technologies shortly thereafter. In the fall of 2015, we announced production support for customer-built Docker images and offered best-practice guidance for anyone integrating DataStax Enterprise (DSE) into Docker.

Today we are making DataStax-built images widely available for non-production use by hosting them in Docker Hub. We want the images to be as easy for you to use as they are for our internal teams.

Internally, we use Docker for many of our unit, integration, and functional tests. Doing so enables us to run many tests in parallel on a single machine and/or test cluster. With this approach we’ve crunched 15+ hours of total testing times into 20-to-60-minute testing rounds. The result is that our developers get feedback much faster, and we want our customers to have this same experience! To learn more about our testing strategy, check Predrag Knezevic’s Cassandra Summit talk.

We also use the DataStax images to power our reference application, KillrVideo. The official images ensure we are using stable versions and testing various configurations quick and easy, and by eliminating much of the setup work we enable users to more quickly learn and understand the platform.

We want to see what you build from the images and will showcase examples within our github account. Existing examples include partner integrations (StreamSets), Security Configuration (LDAP), KillrVideo, and advanced examples of using Docker Compose. Create a pull request to add your own.

This brings us to configuration and customization. We are also providing:

Docker Compose scripts to enable you to easily deploy clusters and expose the components (DSE/Opscenter/Studio) to each other.

Access to the GitHub Repo for developers that want to customize the images

We also want to make these images universally applicable to all your key use cases. For simple use cases, we’ve exposed common settings as environment variables. For advanced configuration management, we’re providing a simple mechanism to let you change or modify configurations without replacing or customizing the containers. You can add any of the approved config files to a mounted host volume and we’ll handle the hard work of mapping them within the container. You can read more about that feature here.

Lastly, adoption and feedback will drive these to approval for production use. Here are a few ways to provide input: